Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1993

Abstract

This volume, produced by three members of the Central Washington University Department of History, on the occasion of the school's centennial, can­not document all the stories of the many thousands of students who have earned degrees here. The lists of courses they took, clubs they joined, professors who introduced them to new subjects for consideration, administrators who shaped the programs and policies, staff people whose services supported their progress, build­ings that housed their residential and scholarly activities, would be interminable. Still, the chapters here succeed at recovering a wide variety of evocative images. Some material deals with the earliest days of the institution, when the Normal School at Ellensburg, just created by the brand-new state of Washington, trained teachers to instruct the school children of the Pacific Northwest. Basically a woman's world, with a mostly-female student body and mostly-female faculty, we meet an era when the senior tea occasioned more enthusiasm than does today's Homecoming Dance. This new volume also captures the school's development into a State College, despite the Great Depression of the 1930s, with a revised and expanded curriculum which attracted increasing numbers of male students and male teachers. This historical work examines the changes brought about by World

War II and the G.l.s who returned after the fighting. We also encounter the modem era, when the college expanded into a university, embracing an ever-growing list of course offerings, majors, and degrees, and attracted still greater numbers of stu­dents, necessitating a physical expansion north to 18th Street. This period brought an engagement with the controversial matters of the day - such as U.S. participa­tion in the Viet Nam War, radicalism in America, censorship and sexual freedom. This record, in documenting so many important aspects of Central's his­tory, will invite readers to supplement their personal experiences with scholarly considerations of general patterns that have emerged at this institution. To arrive at their conclusions, a variety of source materials have been employed by our campus historians, including government documents, interviews with key actors who are still living, school newspapers and yearbooks, catalogs of course offerings, corre­spondence and campus press releases. As professional scholars, the authors have woven broad social, political, and economic themes into this range of personal and official records. The result illuminates the relationships, both between the institu­tion and its many members, and the school and the society it has served for a hun­dred years. This work promises to create a stronger understanding of the past we continue to carry with us.

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Educational use only, the creator retains copyright and information is provided here for educational use only.

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